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This is an ancient post with no relevance to modern systems.

From: Bela Lubkin <filbo@armory.com>
Subject: Re: xenix 386 sort fails on OSR6
Date: 8 Sep 2005 03:18:46 -0400
Message-ID: <200509080018.aa21586@deepthought.armory.com> 
References: <1126140401.425597.163360@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> 

Roger Cornelius wrote:

> OSR6 with MP1
> 
> Up until OSR6, I was still using the Xenix 386 sort, which runs
> approximately 3 x faster than the Openserver sort.  It doesn't run at
> all on OSR6 though, and immediately fails with:
> 
>   sort: allocation error before sort
> 
> I've tried running it under truss, but I don't see anything obviously
> wrong.  Would someone more knowledgable care to look at the truss
> output and give their opinion?  It can be seen here:
> 
>   http://tenzing.org/xenix-sort

The call right before failure, `sysi86(SI86DSCR)', is doing something to
the process's memory map.  Immediately thereafter, it fails with a
memory-related error message.  It appears that the kernel or `xemul'
emulation layer isn't emulating this particular call cleanly enough.

Stepping back: OSR5's slow `sort` always irked me.  It's caused by the
implementation of internationalized collation sequences.  This is code
in libc which was imported into OSR5 from UnixWare 2 (this was long
before SCO bought UnixWare; they bought a license to the SVR4/UW2
compiler and libc).  The same code lived on into UW7 and beyond, but the
performance issues were long since fixed.  `sort` on UW7 is performant.

OSR6 uses a merged libc for OSR5/OSR6 binaries, but apparently this part
is more OSR5 than UW7.

You might try grabbing a UW7 (714 would be best) `sort` binary to see if
it performs any better.  It would run against the UW7-specific libc in
OSR6, which hopefully has the faster collation code.

I did test this on OSR506; a randomly chosen UW7 `sort` binary runs some
simple tests about 2.5x as fast as the native one.

>Bela<
 

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